Pictures and videos are not taken only to record memory. There is an increasing recognition and emphasis on a media sharing and rich reliving experience. There have been many attempts to enable and empower media sharing and browsing.
Popular commercial photo and video management systems have recently started to leverage spatial, temporal, and social cues for image and video organization and browsing. For example, Apple iPhoto and Google Picasa extract global positioning system (GPS) information whenever available and display photos and videos on a map. Although with iPhoto users can configure events that will serve as their basic browsing units, Google Picasa permits users to choose from a flat list view (using years as separators) and a tree view of their pictures. One of the prized additions to both Apple iPhoto and Google Picasa is the ability to detect, extract, group and label faces with a certain amount of user interaction. With respect to browsing, both iPhoto and Picasa permit individual browsing as well as a slide-show option. In addition iPhoto has a skimming option wherein a user can mouse-over an event causing the thumbnail to cycle through the contents of the particular event. Both iPhoto and Picasa permit picture and video tagging and geo-tagging. As an alternative way of browsing Google has proposed Swirl that enables hierarchical browsing of collections. Images are clustered by appearance and content into groups hierarchically.
There is an inherent “intent gap” in providing a browsing or reliving experience to different receivers because it is difficult for current computer systems to know what each receiver likes to see. There is also a practical “semantic gap” in using current computer systems to analyze the semantic content of the images or videos in a media collection. Another aspect that has not been recognized or addressed by the current systems mentioned above is the need to consider the receiver's need in one's diverse social networks that contain busy people always on the run with different interests.